Taming the Crocodile enters its next phase
Kudos, the platform for showcasing research, has launched the second phase of its Taming the Crocodile initiative, which aims to ensure scholarly and scientific content remains discoverable as artificial intelligence increasingly mediates information discovery.
EBSCOHost has joined the initiative as a new headline sponsor and will help steer Phase II alongside Wiley, Emerald Publishing, Springer Nature and Silverchair.
Other sponsors continuing from the first phase include the American Physical Society, Clarivate, Elsevier, IEEE, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis and Wolters Kluwer.
Phase II will shift the focus from mapping the challenges posed by AI-mediated discovery towards developing practical industry responses. The work will include a draft code of practice for metadata and AI discoverability, a cross-sector benchmark of publishers’ responses to AI-mediated discovery, and an observational study examining how researchers find and evaluate information when using AI.
The project is due to begin this month, although a limited number of additional sponsorship places remain available.
Developing practical responses to AI discovery
One of the central strands of Phase II will be the development of a draft code of practice for metadata designed to improve the visibility of authoritative scholarly content within AI search and responses. Kudos said consultation with Crossref, NISO, STM, COUNTER and other organisations had indicated that the issue was not currently being addressed by other initiatives and could therefore be usefully progressed through Taming the Crocodile.
The project will also conduct an anonymous, aggregated publisher survey to build a cross-sector picture of the impact of AI on discovery and usage. This will benchmark publishers’ progress in developing technical, commercial and strategic responses to changing discovery behaviours.
A user observation study will meanwhile examine AI-mediated information journeys in greater depth, shadowing researchers across different disciplines, roles, countries and career stages to explore their choices and behaviours when discovering and evaluating information.
Sam Brooks, Executive Vice President, Library Services, Publisher Services, and Content, EBSCO Information Services, said: “AI is changing the research journey, but the need for trusted, authoritative information hasn’t changed. Our industry has an opportunity to help shape how high-quality scholarly content is discovered and surfaced in these new environments. By working together on practical standards and best practices, we can help ensure that researchers continue to find and connect with the information they can trust.”
“Ensuring content is visible and discoverable via AI is a huge priority for our sector – even provenance, attribution and metrics only matter if authoritative content is actually being surfaced in the first place,” added Charlie Rapple, co-founder of Kudos. “I’m looking forward to building on the insights from Phase I and drawing on my experience setting up the KBART initiative, which went on to become a NISO code of practice, to help publishers, aggregators and platforms optimise AI discoverability as quickly as possible.”
Building on Phase I
New sponsors joining the project will receive access to the Phase I report, which draws on two surveys involving 11,500 researchers and 200 librarians, as well as an environmental scan covering more than 300 sources.
The report includes findings, analysis and recommendations alongside actions for marketing, editorial, customer service, account management and technology teams, and a roadmap for longer-term strategic responses to AI-mediated discovery. Phase II is expected to conclude with a comprehensive report at the end of 2026, accompanied by a quick-read, action-focused executive summary.